Friday, 4 December 2009

I know many things - I know that the only person to miss a penalty at the 1994 World Cup outside of a penalty shootout was Diana Ross, plus I know that pneumatic smut-fountain Russ Meyer started work on a movie with the Sex Pistols, and that the man behind The Mohawks' legendary 60s hammond funk classic The Champ, Alan Hawkshaw, also sired the equally astounding Grange Hill theme.

But the key defining quality to all the nuggets rattling around inside my brain is that none of them have any intrinsic worth that could help secure the future of humanity should Roland Emmerich stops dicking around and actually decides to destroy the world.

Tuesday, 1 December 2009

There is absolutely no revelation in the fact that Quentin Tarantino talks a lot (puts 'a lot' in caps, bold and italics for extra emphasis).

On the one hand it makes him great value, but likewise, it means his words can lead him up garden paths to places where he doesn't have a key to the front door and he has to call Harvey Weinstein to come and pick him up.

Again, no bad thing, he's not hurting anyone - except that some of the things that he lets trickle from his hyperbole hole are beginning to make him look like a no-good celluloid flirt.

Just recently, he shot down the idea that he plans to start work on Kill Bill 3 - having teased it since 2004, even talking about it on Italian TV in October this year. At 2006's Comic Con he stated that after the completion of Death Proof his next work would be a manga follow-up to the Kill Bill films. Instead he made Inglourious Basterds, which in turn he'd been kicking around since 2001.

In 2008 he announced he was working on a unifed extended version of Kill Bill. Hasn't happened. That's not mentioning the Vega Brothers project, Double V Vega, which had a few years of oxygen before dying a death. In 2007 he hinted to The Telegraph his next project would be a Deep South Western. Maybe it will be. Or is going to be the remake of Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill starring Britney Spears or the remake the Hong Kong martial arts classic Come Drink With Me instead?

Oh, and earlier this year he said that he's weighing up filming a Len Deighton novel. And he told The Times he'll retire when he's 60. With each of these statements, he's sadly diminishing the excitement that his projects used to inspire.

Clearly, there's a fairground barker at work here, maybe Tarantino's either amusing himself or keeping his legend fresh in people's minds between projects. The problem is with each claim he's turning into the boy who cried that his next film will be a exploitation western crime revenge fest about a wolf played by Eli Roth who keeps attacking Uma Thurman's sheep (looks for way out of tortured end metaphor. Fails).

PCCP notes: this was written before any of us discovering that Sherlock Holmes did not hum and ahead of Guy Ritchie appearing on Stars In Their Eyes as Lazarus.

Two friends of mine, both people with a high-enough intellect that means that they can forget about remembering how to breathe and concentrate on the bigger things, both remarked that Guy Ritchie's forthcoming Sherlock Holmes flick looks like it may be, you know, shit.

Chances are they probably won't be the last to suggest that, then it'll probably officially ratified when Chris Moyles says he's looking forward to it. Maybe they were understandably hoodwinked by the film's use of the Robert Downey Jr cloaking device, a seductive bit of kit which has the ability to give any film a veneer of hipster quality. So seductive, that it shielded them from the obvious.

Ritchie got lucky back in '98 with Lock, Stock... , then again with Snatch, when he cannily anglicised the Tarantino tropes, smartly fixing them to the towbar of the British crime film genre while catching the waft from Loaded's laddy reclamation of the Michael Caine wideboy chic. Any time he's tried to do anything since it's gone really impressively, put-a-blue-placque-up-here-to-commemorate-it wrong - Swept Away is a turkey sandwich on December 27th, while critics took turns in seeing who could administer the biggest kicking when he released Revolver. I'll put my hand up, though - I didn't go all Linda Blair during Rocknrolla, just because Ritchie repeated what worked from the early films, plus it at least implied that he may not be taking it all that seriously (casting Peep Show's Matt King, who ripped awesome piss out of him in Star Stories was a neat touch), and that it steamed full-pelt into so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure territory.

The maths are simple - two years of making films people liked, ten years of piping out shit, combined with a clear inability to display either the ideas or the execution that creep above competence.